


everybody wants to rule the world

by principessa



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-04
Updated: 2014-01-04
Packaged: 2018-01-07 11:58:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1119566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/principessa/pseuds/principessa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn’t clean magic, none of that limited university-approved shit that they teach now. It’s dirty and foul and unorganized, chaotic and a mix-mash of styles and experience, of cracks in buildings and grimy sidewalks and gutter water spilling in your eyes. </p><p>It’s Gotham, basically.</p>
            </blockquote>





	everybody wants to rule the world

**Author's Note:**

> i literally just wanted to write a thing where selina kyle turns into a cat and this got really out of control

Selina smirks and waggles her fingers at him, lips curling as she sweetly says ‘Buh-bye now!’.

She leaps off the building, swinging into the shadows and melting into them. 

Batman chases after her, stopping when all he sees in the alley below him is two reflective eyes staring back at him. He looks at the cat for a moment before cursing, chasing after a shadow that has already vanished.

Selina laughs internally and the cat turns to patter back home. 

Men are such idiots.

-

She learns magic quickly, on the streets. You have to when you’re in a situation like hers. It isn’t clean magic, none of that limited university-approved shit that they teach now. It’s dirty and foul and unorganized, chaotic and a mix-mash of styles and experience, of cracks in buildings and grimy sidewalks and gutter water spilling in your eyes. 

It’s Gotham, basically.

She thinks that Bruce could have learned, if he had wanted to. But he lost his parents in an alley and left to wander the world, training in the arts of man and science and investigation, concrete things that you can hold in your hand.

Maybe because he couldn’t hold his parents’ hands anymore. Maybe she was looking too far into it.

In any case, if it had ever been possible once upon a time, he sure as hell couldn’t learn now. No, not with that thick of a skull, all that physics and chemistry and whatever the hell else. 

Of course, that’s not to say that magic isn’t a science, either.

But Selina wouldn’t know. It’s not like she was taught it, or anything. 

Selina isn’t taught things. She learns them. She hides and she watches and she steals and she makes the power her own until it’s running through her veins like the rest of this patchwork city. 

-

She’s sitting in a café in the Diamond District, legs crossed under the table, flipping through an issue of Vanity Fair. 

The couple at the table next to her are discussing a break-in that happened at the Kane residence, what was taken, and was it going to interfere with Bette Kane’s societal coming-out? 

The man frowns, runs his hand through his hair worriedly. “Their security system is rock-solid, though, same as ours! You’d have to be able to walk through walls to get past it like that.”

Selina sips her café au lait and suppresses a grin. That was one way to do it, certainly, though it’s not nearly as fun.

-

Selina meets Pam by complete accident. 

She’s slinking around East End, looking for trouble - and she isn’t sure if she wanted to get in trouble or stop it yet - when she feels a tug around the inside of her wrists, her fingers, her toes. And, huh.

In the back of her mind, a small - very small - voice tells her to go home, not to mess with this. Magic can be dangerous, sometimes. 

(It’s a voice she hasn’t heard since she was a little girl, when that voice spoke into the retriever to a 911 operator, _my daddy is dead, and now I’m all alone_.)

She shuts the voice back into the far depths of her mind - shuts a door on it - and follows the tug anyways. It’s not fun if it isn’t dangerous.

It leads her to Robinson Park, and there’s a green woman with violent red hair sitting by the sandbox - except now it’s harboring a giant rose bush, which the woman is tending to.

(Selina vaguely thinks that she has lipstick the same shade as her hair.)

The woman looks up at her, moves as if to wipe sweat off her forehead. “You are a thief,” she remarks.

“You’re a plant,” Selina fires back, because there isn’t much else to say, is there.

The woman smiles. “So I am.”

Selina meets Pam by complete accident, and she walks out of it with a rose plant for her apartment and a new friend. It’s not altogether a bad feeling.

-

Selina is fourteen years old, and she thinks she might have a sister. 

It’s been five years - no, six - more? she can’t remember - since she’s been living alone. Well, not alone. She’s never really alone, really. It’s Gotham, after all. 

She remembers a Maggie, for sure, but she isn’t sure who that is anymore. A sister? A friend? And what is Maggie short for, anyways? 

Sometimes, she wonders if her Maggie is an imaginary friend, someone she made up so that Gotham wouldn’t be so daunting, those first weeks alone. That would explain why she doesn’t remember her well. Because Selina isn’t afraid of the city anymore, not really. 

Gotham has a way of digging through your skin and burying itself underneath your ribs and down your throat and dangerously near your heart, if you’re dumb enough not to shield it. It’s a challenge like any other and if there’s one thing Selina is sure of, is that she never backs down from a challenge.

She is fourteen years old, and she thinks she might have a sister, just like she thinks she must have had parents at some point.

What she does have is her two hands and feet and she has her head and she has her magic, and as she grows older she has other things too, and she uses all of the tools at her disposal to win. 

-

Stealing is easy, when you’re a child, and when you’re a girl. 

Living however is another thing altogether, and sooner it’s easier to stay hidden, away from the johns and the hecklers and the rest of the scum in this city.

(Selina says that like she isn’t every bit as much of a bottom feeder as the rest of them.)

She learns early on, to melt into the shadows and to hide in plain sight.

-

Harley is the one who tells her about the university, eventually.

Selina and Harley are lounging on her bed drinking cheap cocktails, a ginger-and-black cat walking over them as they laugh.

Harley tells her about the university, about learning magic in a classroom and getting a degree and getting a limiter set on your magic at graduation. 

“So, Witch Quinzel, how did that work out for you?” Selina is a little bit drunk off their fruity mixes, and she asks the question without thinking it all the way through.

It’s mean, but well. Selina isn’t exactly the nicest girl around.

Harleen Quinzel was a diploma-ed telepath, one of the university’s bests. She was a fool, as well. Everyone and their mother knew that the Joker was out of his mind. Harleen took a little peek -

Selina isn’t really sure of the schematics of it all, but if Harley’s magic was limited once, it sure as hell isn’t now. She figures that the Joker broke her, if the way that Harley’s magic randomly goes off sometimes means anything. 

Which isn’t to say that Harley isn’t her friend. Just.

Selina is glad that she learned magic on her own. University witches don’t seem very well off, from what she can tell.

-

Memories work differently for animals. Selina knows this like she knows that cops are rotten and men are idiots and pretty things are worth a lot.

There are whole years of her childhood that are blurred, bright, confusing. 

She learned to turn into a cat from the army veteran who slept under Thompson’s clinic. He used to sit in a pile under his filthy parka and beg coffee off the doctors when he could. Calling him her mentor would be a blatant lie, but he did teach her one of her best tricks.

It was raining, and she was curled into a ball on the back step of a strip club, huddled on the step and trying not to get wet. She failed. Two eyes shone at her from the fire escape across the alley, and a mangy gutter cat with a missing paw jumped down to sit next to her. 

She scratched it a bit under its’ chin waited for the rain to stop. When the pounding slowed to a drizzle, she turned back to the animal to give it one last pet before leaving.

She was at the mouth of the alley before she turned back one last time to see the homeless man snoring slightly.

After that, she followed the man much more closely, watching him come and go outside the clinic. A harried looking woman with a young son in the Narrows would occasionally thow him scraps, as a cat. And stolen candy bars and apples weren’t going to last her forever.

The homeless veteran felt his magic in his knees and the stump of what was once his shoulder. When he slept, Selina hunched over him and dug her fingers into his skin. He didn’t wake, but she had no doubt that he knew.

It was jittery, at first, and foreign - this wasn’t her magic, not at all - but Selina gritted her teeth and beat the feeling into submission, until the insides of her wrists and her fingers and toes no longer burned.

A black cat and a gutter cat with a missing paw scavenged for scraps together. 

What a world, Selina thought cynically, that was nicer to cats than it was to orphans.

-

Selina Kyle is seven years old, and her parents are dead. Her sister is taken to a home for girls, and Selina runs away.

There are men in uniforms looking for her for a week, and Selina hides in cracks between walls and on grimy sidewalks with gutter water spilling into her eyes. 

There is a tugging feeling on the insides of her wrists and her fingers and her toes, and she follows it to the bottom of Crime Alley.

There’s a wet wallet on the floor, and a gun, and behind the dumpster there’s a broken strand of pearls. Inside the wallet are soggy bills that can last her a good while, and the gun isn’t loaded, but that doesn’t matter.

She pockets the money and pearls and tucks the gun into the back of her pants.

And sometimes, when she’s walking or hiding or climbing over roofs and through windows, she’ll feel another tug that will lead her to something useful.

Diamonds sell for an awful lot with the right fence, she finds out.

-

She is lying down in Bruce Wayne’s bed, and he is stretched out next to her, scars dotting his body. She could trace them, map them out, like a heroine from a romance novel, but that has never been Selina’s style.

She wonders if she should leave.

(That isn’t the real question.)

He’s serious, almost too serious, and he’s brooding, and he’s gloomy and awkward and he’s far too smart, for an idiot.

He dances with two left feet and he never smiles, except for at her, once, and he has children that he leads to his death. 

He dresses up as a bat every night to go and fight crime because he can’t fight his crippling daddy issues, and he spends every waking second of the day working and living his double life. 

His public life is too public and his private life is too shielded and he wouldn’t even tell her his name until she found it out for herself.

Selina can see herself happy with this man, and it utterly terrifies her.

(Now we’re getting closer to the issue here.)

She imagines herself living in this giant house, surrounded by these dysfunctional children. Her cats rolling around on Bruce’s expensive bedsheets, her hairbrush and makeup bag on the bathroom counter, sitting down to honest-to-God dinners with Bruce and his butler and his kids, calling them by their given names and them calling her by hers. 

For half a second, she imagines a little girl with black hair and green eyes and magic in her dimples sitting in Bruce’s lap.

She imagines the tests that will doubtlessly follow, the obsessive calculations, the denials, the ever constant return to science and logic and things that Bruce is too afraid to acknowledge.

Selina leaves while Bruce is in the shower the next morning.

(Love was never her style, anyways. She doesn’t think it was really his, either.)

-

Selina vaults over a balcony, grinning. The insides of her wrists and her fingers and her toes are singing a serenade to the sirens that are chasing her, and her laughter as she flies through the air feels a little like a song.

The officer that was chasing her curses as he skids to a dead-end alley, empty but for a cat that meows at him threateningly. He stares at it through his windshield until it hides behind a trash can. His car reverses and speeds away. 

Selina Kyle smiles as she walks out of the alley, re-adjusts her backpack, turns down the street.

The sky is just as grimy as the streets and the smog hides the moon and the stars. Under the cover of darkness she heads home, making a reminder to stop by the store and get some orange juice, and a new tube of lipstick, to water the rose plant when she gets home. She needs to call Pam and meet up with Harley for drinks at some point this week.

Gotham is still dirty and foul and unorganized, a chaotic mix-mash of people and places and things that shouldn’t be. But. Selina has her cats and her friends and her magic, she has a roof over her head and a job she actually likes.

She climbs the stairs to her apartment. Things aren’t as bad as they could be.


End file.
